So 5am rolls around and I pop my eyes open. Apparently I fell asleep on top of the covers of the bed still wearing my clothes. I must have been pretty tired hehe. 2 hours later (7am for us mathematically challenged folk) the alarm went off, ah the famous alarm, maybe someday it will actually make it to the site and you guys can download it and say to yourselves “my god, these guys are retarded”, and for some reason I was actually awake so I grabbed the laptop and started to name some more pictures. I hate when I get behind on this stuff because so many people are waiting to see what’s happening but “someone” isn’t give me much time to do anything about it, sigh. AOL is stupid and slow, that I’m 100% sure of. We got spam on our AOL account that we NEVER sent mail from, NEVER gave out to anyone, NEVER went to any chat rooms or forums or really anywhere except to connect to the internet to upload stuff occasionally, guess they got an inside man, not cool.

We went downstairs after a little bit for a quick breakfast and for some odd reason I have started to order coffee, and when I drink 2 or 3 of my super sugar and creamed cups of the stuff I get a little silly. We decided to split up to get outa the town earlier so Andy took the garbage bags of clothes to the cleaners and John and I went to Wal-Mart to shop for stuff. We were mainly lookin for long underwear for the Sierra Nevadas because we figured we’d hit like 1 or 2 cold days there and that would be it. Andy kept wanting to pick up this expensive all weather jacket but we resisted the idea and ended up picking up some cheap (but really nice) Remington gloves and a hat along with our thermal underclothes which they didn’t have the really cool ones in stock anymore and we informed the Wal-Mart guy that we couldn’t come back another day, I don’t think he believed us hehe.

We left there and headed to Shilo where our transport bus took a half hour to come pick us up and take us back to the Stockman (“back to the hotel”, good 80’s song with a cool beat, bumped that in my trans am many a cruising nights). We returned to our hotel and Andy was nowhere to be found so we called down and extended our check-out to 1pm and packed up. Andy finally showed back up with our bags of clothes and socks and we packed quickly to get moving. Downstairs we checked out and finally met Sean, the very cool manager of Stockman’s that gave us the room for the night whom we thanks graciously.

We started on down the road and ended up stopping a couple blocks down at a Shell gas station for Andy to pick up some stuff. After about 10 minutes we were off again, yay. We passed a lady walking down the sidewalk that we briskly laid our story on her and she just smiled and said she would go home and check out the site, I love people like that, the ones that don’t believe you until they go home and actually bring up the site and see we we’re actually doin this! We were almost out of town when I got a little thirsty and saw a little Coke distribution building up ahead. Just as a joke I said we should go inside and see if they have any extras laying around for us and when we went inside they had the coolest thing, a 25 cent pop machine in their lobby! A couple of the guys came out to see what we were doing and we all drank a couple cokes and talked for about 10 minutes before they went back to work and we went back to walking.

We stopped at a mini underpass that had a 3 foot tall tightly packed dirt ground that looked like someone had blocked off both ends, filled up the underpass with muddy water, let it dry, and unblocked it, weird. It had lots of graffiti too which we had seen a lot in our travels. The most disturbing message was a quote from a completely horrid movie called Millennium which is basically about the apocalypse times and to save our humanity a group of people go back in time and appear on airplanes that are about to crash, take the people off the plane and replace them with already dead people. Then take the people they just took off the plane and bring them to the present apocalypse, and then send them “somewhere” into the future. They say they don’t know where they are sending them and hope that it’s a better place than where they are now, trust me, it’s pretty hard to sit through the whole movie hehe.

We again attempted to stay off the road by walking along side a set of train tracks that were raised about 5 feet above where we were (think the tracks were on top of the hill and we were walking at the base of the hill). It was a nice path until mother nature decided that just ahead would be a great spot to plant a field of prickly bushes, and yes for some unknown reason we did try to walk through them, how dumb are we? We finally gave up and headed over to the road and started walking down it. We took another break and, what a surprise, it was getting dark and we were still miles from our next town we wanted to get to. It was funny because the side of the road every 50 feet or so had these rumble marks and John was in front but when we got to the rumble strips he would step off the shoulder, to the left, onto the little strip of gravel between the shoulder and the guard rail. Well, he did this for about 2 miles and, for some reason right about the time John would step off the shoulder to dodge the rumble strips, Andy would be almost walking on top of him but just slightly to John’s left so John would basically cut Andy off and Andy would have to put on the brakes for a sec. For some reason this went on for almost the entire hour we walked and for some reason Andy got really pissed at John and ran past him. John and I looked at each other, shook our heads, and laughed which I think made Andy more angry and at our next break we took the whole 20 minutes trying to explain to Andy what John was doing dodging the rumble strips and trying to figure out why Andy got mad and just ran off like he did. I’ll never understand what’s going on inside his little head while we’re on this trip.

With that drama over with, we headed on down the road, which looked a little…. Strange… up ahead. As we got closer we recognized what we were looking at as a giant tunnel. I was the first to let out a big sigh which John and Andy both agreed with. We pondered why no one told us of this obviously huge tunnel in the road and the lack of a place to walk through it, but those thoughts are futile as the wheelers (our word for people driving vehicles hehe) never pay attention to what they are driving by and probably don’t even notice this tunnel when they go through it. I noticed a train bridge right next to it and it would be kinda neat to walk through a train bridge that goes through a part of a mountain at night (yeah, creepy as hell, but fun as hell too!) but there was a rather large chain link fence blocking the way with barb wire on top of it. We tried to figure out what to do and I pretty much noticed that there was hardly any traffic on the opposite side of the road (west bound lane? We always walk against the flow of traffic so we walk on the east bound lane, so yeah that’s right, sorry a little thinking out loud) so we pulled out the video camera and started taping. Check out the video, it’s pretty cool.

Obviously we didn’t die and we made it through the tunnel, albeit a little more excitement than we wanted that night, but it was cool. We started down 80 again and we noticed 2 things. To the right off in the distance we noticed what looked like a brightly lit neighborhood but from the signs on the road it was a firefighter’s school. That’s pretty sweet. The second thing we noticed was that there was a newly paved and brightly painted lined 2 lane road. We immediately headed down and hopped the barbed wire fence (we’re becoming masters at fence jumping, but I swear on our return trip I’m cutting every fence down that I see, why is there fences friggin EVERYWHERE!) and started down the road.

We took our break right at place in the road where you could turn right and cross over 80 to get to the stuff on the other side of 80. As we were sitting there I was looking up at the sky (much like I always do, so cool) I see what I thought, at first, was a shooting star, except it changed it’s direction slightly like 3 times and went from straight above us to disappearing on the horizon. It was visible for probably 20 seconds before I lost it. Neither of the other guys saw it which is always the case, it’s always 1 guy that sees something like that and then you spend years trying to convince your friends you saw it. I just called it a UFO sighting and left it at that. Now you may immediately say to yourself UFO’s don’t exist, or that I’m silly for believing in aliens, etc. etc. etc. Well, think about it, UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object. If I stood you out in the middle of a field, told you to look up at the sky, and then tossed a flashlight or a rock over your head, to you that would be a UFO because you wouldn’t know what it was. It could have been a low orbit satellite, piece of space debris, alien spacecraft (we ARE in Nevada), and experimental government light traveling flying monkey craft, who knows hehe. Anyway, it was neat and I’m glad I was out there to see stuff like that.

We started down the road again and almost immediately 2 police cars boxed us in, one came from behind and 1 came from the way we were headed. 2 cops stepped out and asked us what we were doing. We laid our story on them and within minutes we were talkin. The 2 police officers, Travis and Jim, informed us that not too far from where we were was a prison and someone had reported 3 suspicious looking guys with backpacks walking down the road. We laughed as our stuff is way too spiffy looking to buy with mere cigarettes and sexual favors in prison (hehe). They also informed us to keep an eye out for mountain lions as some have been seen in this area and between here and the Las Vegas/Reno area, interesting. They also told us about the gangs in Reno so we started thinking of other routes besides that one to go through, and since Las Vegas is too far north and owned by the mob (is it still?) Carson City ended up being our final answer, but that’s later in the story.

We said our goodbyes to the cool cops and headed down the road some more. Along the way we walked through a questionable part of town and played a game of name that smell. It wasn’t all as bad as you would think. There were a couple parts where I smelled daisies, lilacs, and lots of laundry fabric softener. When we got into town we stopped at a Pilot gas station and Subway (sandwich place). The Subway was still open so we got sandwiches and sat down to get a little work done. Andy took out his pocket PC and started journaling while John and I went to the bathroom and bought a couple things. We came back to the booth, sat down, and waited on Andy who was still typing, which wasn’t a big deal. Well, not until he opened his mouth and said “now you know how I feel every break”. WTF was that supposed to mean? John and I are doing pretty much everything, John keeping the website up to and running and me trying to take AND name 100’s of pictures daily, all while trying to keep up with sergeant Andy and his march to California. He sits during breaks while John and I try to keep up with our notebooks so we don’t forget things when we finally get to write the journal for the day (which is how I’m writing these now if you haven’t guessed, but I can read a little bit and basically re-live the day almost to a tee, my mind is cool like that). He hasn’t handed out a single business card or talked to anyone the whole trip unless John or I stop to talk to someone, then he says like 1 sentence or just interrupts or talks over us when we’re talking about something. John and I got really irritated at his little comment and just said “screw you” and put on our packs, and then we stood there for like 5 minutes while he threw away his wrappers, packed up his stuff, and put on his pack.

We left the Pilot gas station and headed toward town where we heard there was a park we could set up in, but then one of the girls from the Pilot and her boyfriend pulled up and offered to take us down a couple blocks to the park. We hopped on the back of his truck and he headed down to the park which was a baseball field. We said our goodbyes and headed over to the dugout, doing a quick sweep for sprinklers, then setting up our tents almost against the bullpen (place where the players sit and wait to be up to bat). I was still so annoyed I couldn’t type anything and I just went to sleep. I’m glad this trip is almost over and I really shouldn’t feel like that. Andy’s attitude is clashing more and more with John and my attitudes about the trip. We want adventure, wonder, to see and experience things only this trip can offer. Of course we care about finishing, we’re going to finish, no doubt in my mind. There was never a doubt that we would finish even from the first day, we started this crazy thing and we were going to finish it, but with Andy it was all about rushing to the “finish line” and I really believed he should have gone on his own trip or gone ahead without us if we were holding him back from finishing when he wanted to with all of our “stopping at every shiny thing along the road” as he put it. I’m pulling a John now, sorry, goodnight everyone.
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